Last Friday, a customer paged me to say that they could not open an Oracle 8.0.5 database after the RAID array crashed. Before continuing the story, I should mention that this database wasn’t under our Pythian umbrella and my team had no idea of its existence — some customers choose to let us manage everything, others try to find some balance. Well, it’s their choice. But I digress.

It turned out that this database was in NOARCHIVELOG mode and there was not even a cold backup. Furthermore, they didn’t even have a database export. It’s always Friday when stuff like this happens!

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